Car Factories Research Articles

When Kia Came to Georgia: Southern Transplants and the Growth of America's "Other" Automakers

When Kia Came to Georgia:Southern Transplants and the Growth of America's "Other" Automakers Timothy J. Minchin (bio) On February 26, 2010, more than five hundred dignitaries from South Korea and the United States gathered in West Point, Georgia, for the opening of Kia Motors's first North American factory. Built on a 2,200-acre site, the $1.2 billion plant covered 2.4 million square feet and had the capacity to produce 300,000 vehicles a year. As Automotive News—a leading trade publication—observed, the development was "big by any … standard." It created about 3,000 jobs, with almost as many again provided by regional suppliers. The outcome was a massive boost to Troup County, a former textile area in western Georgia that had one of the highest unemployment rates in the state. The factory opening was also a proud moment for Governor George Ervin "Sonny" Perdue III, who been courting Kia since 2003, when he had first visited company officials in South Korea. "Kia's decision to locate its first US manufacturing operation here in Georgia will be a milestone both for this company and our state," he declared at the ceremony.1 Outside observers saw the plant as very significant. Dubbed "a defining moment for the region" by one state-level publication, Kia's arrival also attracted national and international press attention. "An increasing number of Asian carmakers are opening [End Page 889] manufacturing operations in the US," summarized the BBC, "particularly in the South."2 The Kia plant was an important addition to a thriving U.S. economic sector. In 1978 Volkswagen AG established the first foreign-owned assembly plant in the United States, and over subsequent decades the "transplant" sector grew steadily.3 By 2008, these plants employed over 78,000 workers and turned out (in 2005) more than 25 percent of all vehicles made domestically. Attracted by the region's lower wages and weak unions—as well as by generous incentive packages—most transplants were located in the South. While early examples were concentrated in the upper South, by the early twenty-first century many had set up in the Deep South. Alabama alone lured plants from Honda, Hyundai, Mercedes-Benz, and Toyota and thus rapidly emerged as one of the leading automotive states in the country.4 In 2003, meanwhile, Toyota's new $800 million truck assembly facility in San Antonio, Texas, became the most southerly automotive plant in the country. The growth of the southern transplants was part of what Automotive News [End Page 890] termed "a tectonic shift in the North American auto industry.""While the traditional Big 3 slowly deconstruct, transplant automakers are building plants, adding r&d centers and hiring workers," it explained in 2005.5 Southern auto plants, added the New York Times in the same year, "set [the] industry's pace." In 2015, the respected Center for Automotive Research documented that five of the top ten auto-producing states—Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Texas—were in the South.6 Kia's arrival was an important episode in the industry's development, and it deserves to be explored in its own right. To date, very few studies have focused specifically on the incoming car factories. Firsthand accounts, often by reporters or politicians, provide close-grained insights into particular early transplants yet lack wider context.7 In addition, researchers in management and organizational behavior have explored aspects of the industry, especially efforts by Japanese firms to enact their management techniques in the United States. The globalization strategies of large automakers have also been studied, with some analysis focusing on joint ventures between the Michigan-based Big Three (General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler) and overseas firms. This work has largely occurred in specialist articles and dissertations. Very few studies have focused on the Deep South, and the early stages of the industry's growth in the South have been covered more than have subsequent developments, including the arrival of Korean automakers, which generated some tension between Korean managers and American workers. Detailed scholarly examinations of how and why major players chose to invest in the South [End Page 891] have yet to be written...

Siegelbaum, Lewis H Cars for Comrades: The Life of the Soviet Automobile Siegelbaum, Lewis The Faustian Bargain of the Soviet Automobile (review)

REVIEWS 363 not really enough to rectify this structural tension. But this is an impressive book that has the merit of making the history of Soviet intelligence accessible to a wider scholarly audience. It will be very helpful to teachers and students alike, and also of interest to the more specialist general reader. School of History, University of Kent Philip Boobbyer Siegelbaum, Lewis H. Cars for Comrades: The Life of the Soviet Automobile. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 2008. xvii + 309 pp. Glossary. Maps. Illustrations. Tables. Notes. Index. $39.95: £20.50. Siegelbaum, Lewis. The Faustian Bargain of the Soviet Automobile. Trondheim Studies on East European Cultures and Societies, 24. The Program on East European Cultures and Societies, Norwegian University of Sciences and Technology, Trondheim, 2008. 32 pp. Notes. NOK39.00 (paperback). These two titles — a full-length academic monograph covering the entire history of the Soviet automobile and an occasional paper focusing on the late Soviet period — offer a welcome fresh perspective on Communist society. Lewis H. Siegelbaumbeginsthelongerbookbyidentifyingatheoreticaltensionbetweenthe collectivist ethos of Soviet ideology and the car as ‘an object of individual desire, a mobile private space’ (p. ix). Indeed, we learn that Stalin preferred to distribute personal cars to Soviet notables, while Khrushchev promised the Soviet people an abundance of taxis and rental cars, rather than privately-owned vehicles. The Soviet automobile revolution came late, in the 1970s, and in connection with the Brezhnev regime’s focus on consumer goods. For decades the Soviet automobile industry served first of all the state-run economy by producing trucks; 1972 was the first year that it churned out more cars than trucks. Professor Siegelbaum brought to this project his considerable expertise in the social and labour history of the Soviet Union. The monograph’s chapters offer as much information on the construction of car factories, their workforce, and the drivers of their cars as they do on the cars themselves. The book is organized thematically rather than chronologically. The first three chapters are devoted to three major car factories: ZIS (later ZIL) in Moscow, GAZ in Gor´kii, and VAZ in Togliatti. There is inevitably some repetition across the chapters, because the first two factories were constructed during the First Five-Year Plan and all three faced similar challenges during the post-Soviet period. At the same time, the cars they produced marked different periods and different social trends in Soviet history. In Siegelbaum’s apt phrase, ZIS limousines represented ‘the Soviet state on wheels’ (p. 27). Originally based on Packard, they were produced using imported American presses and cutting and stamping machines, as well as the slave labour in a Gulag camp that specialized in leather upholstery. These large SEER, 94, 2, APRIL 2016 364 and heavy luxury cars served the top Soviet brass. Stalin was driven around in an armour-plated seven-ton ZIS-115; he also recommended a change in the insignia on the grill for the entire ZIS series, thereby perhaps underscoring his symbolic ownership of the brand. After all, ZIS stood for the Stalin Factory. The car factory built in the city of Gor´kii was the first attempt at establishing a Soviet Detroit. The largest automobile plant in Europe when it was completed in 1932, it was the result of Soviet cooperation with the Ford Company. The famous M-1 model, or ‘Emka’, in Soviet parlance, was copied from the 1933 Ford V8 Model 40, but supplied with a four-cylinder engine. After the war GAZ made the first Soviet car that ordinary consumers could purchase, the M-20 Pobeda (‘Victory’). The later Volga models, the M-21 and M-24, were the preferred means of transportation for mid-ranking bureaucrats and successful Soviet writers. It was the Togliatti project that propelled the Soviet Union into the age of mass car production. A mega-deal with Fiat in 1966 resulted in the construction of an integrated car factory in the new city conveniently renamed after an Italian Communist leader. The factory marked Lenin’s 100th birthday in 1970 by producing the first VAZ-2101 Zhiguli cars (based on the Fiat-124 and exported under the name Lada). By 1974 the factory was producing 660,000...

産業用ロボットの3次元把持姿勢導出のための人工ポテンシャル法

In Japan, the labor power is decreasing by the aging population and lower birthrate. In production fields, there is a big demand for robots to compensate for reduced manpower. Today, industrial robot has been used for spot welding, arc welding, coating, and assembly, material handling machines in car factories. However, the functions performed by them are limited and difficult to adapt to different environments because most factory robots are only controlled by sequence control.Operation of the industrial robot is generally required that the teaching work by humans. The proposal of the path planning method of object grasping is required. Artificial potential method is one of the path planning method. We therefore propose the gripping of an object by the manipulator and the hand by using commonly available 6 degrees of freedom based on the idea of different potential function and artificial potential method.

Post‐War Migration Flows and Disparities in Mortality from Age 50 Years Onwards: the Case of Turin in Italy

AbstractCompositional changes due to internal migration can modify the distribution of health outcomes, death rates, and socio‐economic characteristics of a specific geographical area. Migration flows may affect patterns of socio‐economic inequalities in mortality as well. However, despite these inequalities being an important social and geopolitical feature of an area, there is still little empirical evidence on this effect. This paper contributes to deepening the knowledge about this phenomenon by investigating whether post‐war internal migration in Italy affected the pattern of mortality inequality by socio‐economic status, from age 50 years onwards, in Turin, one of the main industrial areas of the country, to which many low‐educated individuals from the southern regions migrated, seeking jobs in the car factories. Migrants might be selected in terms of robustness because of the healthy migrant effect. However, low‐educated individuals are employed in heavier and riskier jobs. They thus undergo a faster health selection due to exposure to a higher mortality risk that selects the most robust individuals. This paper hypothesised that the interplay of these mechanisms might have produced a homogenisation process towards robustness of the population by reducing the unobserved heterogeneity in survival chances and that these processes affected men more than women, because women were likely to be more passive actors in the migratory decisions and less heavily involved in the industrialisation process. The results show that women have higher levels of heterogeneity in susceptibility to death and wider differentials mortality by education level than men, which both support the hypotheses. © 2014 The Authors. Population, Space and Place. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

War on wheels

During the second world war the British motor industry underwent a major transformation. From manufacturing cars and commercial vehicles, factories switched to turning out military vehicles, tanks, aircraft engines, aircraft and a variety of other weapons for the Armed Forces. The government invested significantly in existing car factories and new `shadow factories' to increase production. Existing car factories were expanded and shadow factories were built by the government in two schemes so the car industry could duplicate production of an aircraft or aero engine factory.

The Effects of Ocean Acidification on the food location behavior and Locomotion of Pagurus Longicarpus

Although the mechanism is unknown, recent studies have indicated that seawater with reduced pH may affect the behavior of marine species. Ocean acidification resulting from increasing amounts of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere from car exhausts, factories, and other sources may therefore affect a marine animal’s food location ability and locomotion. In this experiment, the effect of seawater at different pHs on the food location behavior and locomotion of the long-clawed hermit crab (Pagurus longicarpus) was assessed. The hermit crabs were exposed for 5 and 19 days to seawater with pH levels predicted to be equivalent to the worldwide average pH in approximately 100 and 150 years (pH 7.85 and 7.75, respectively), as well as to seawater at the worldwide pH found today (approximately pH 8). On average, the hermit crabs traveled significantly faster in tests with food present than in tests with no food available. There was no statistically significant effect of lowered pH water on hermit crabs’ average time to reach a piece of food, their speed, or their path length. Hermit crabs kept in lowered pH water for 5 days did take longer to reach a piece of food than their counterparts kept in untreated seawater, although the differences were not significant. Thus, it cannot be concluded that decreased pH has an effect on hermit crabs’ food location behavior and locomotion. This is not surprising since they tend to inhabit intertidal zones and estuaries where they withstand a wide range of environmental conditions. Further studies, including those with longer treatment durations and a wider range of pHs, are needed to determine if and how ocean acidification will alter hermit crabs’ food location abilities.

JHP and History of Philosophy Today

JHP and History of Philosophy Today Tad M. Schmaltz (bio) As Part of the Celebration of the Fiftieth anniversary of the initial publication of the Journal of the History of Philosophy, I would like to reflect a bit on my experiences at JHP during my time as editor (2003–10), as well as to address some historiographical questions concerning the field of the history of philosophy, which it is the mission of JHP to serve. I will start by reporting that I was surprised when my colleague at Duke at the time, the late Ed Mahoney, indicated in 2002 that there was serious interest in my applying for an opening for the editorship of JHP. To that point, every JHP editor following Richard Popkin1 had been either a student or a colleague of Popkin’s. Though of course I knew of Popkin’s influential scholarship, I had been neither his student nor his colleague, and indeed had never met him. Moreover, I had no experience in editing a journal when I was invited to apply. It is clear that the Board was thinking “outside the box” in considering me for the editorship. Despite my lack of connection to the JHP “family” and my lack of experience in journal editorship, I decided to apply at least in part because I considered JHP to be the best journal devoted to the history of philosophy, and among the top philosophy journals generally. To be sure, it is clear from the record that the journal has had a history of considerable financial difficulties and serious personal squabbles.2 However, by the time I considered applying for the editorship, JHP was not only financially solvent but had also had steady leadership for some time. Such leadership allowed the journal to establish itself as a prime venue for scholarship in the history of philosophy. I believe that in ultimately offering me the editorship, the JHP Board in effect was making a transition to a more genuinely “post-Popkin” era than the one that [End Page 477] followed the official end of Popkin’s long term as editor in 1980.3 Though this transition has not been entirely smooth, it has been reinforced by subsequent additions to the Board of a broad range of scholars not previously associated with JHP. In accepting the Board’s offer, I was eager to facilitate this transition by instituting some changes that I thought would help to maintain the quality of the journal in new circumstances. One of my first initiatives was to establish the Current Scholarship series, devoted to critical reviews from senior scholars of the recent literature on various historical periods and topics. My hope was that such a series would prove to be a useful research tool for specialists and students alike. But I also saw the series as a way of involving senior scholars in the journal. As happens with many refereed journals, issues of JHP included mainly articles from junior scholars struggling to build a case for tenure. I think it is in fact important that JHP publish the best articles in the history of philosophy from junior scholars, and certainly I appreciated the opportunity to publish in the journal prior to receiving tenure. But it is also important that senior scholars have a presence in the journal, and I took the Current Scholarship series to be one way of providing for such a presence. The first essay in this series was published in July 2005, and six Current Scholarship essays appeared during my time as Editor. I am glad to say that two more essays have been published since then, and that there are at least four others in the works. May Current Scholarship continue to flourish! I also was sensitive to complaints in the “blogosphere” that journals were not reviewing submissions in a sufficiently timely manner. Indeed, one blogger has claimed that “many [philosophy] journals are run like soviet car factories,” taking a year or longer to come to a decision.4 Certainly I did not want JHP to be justly compared to a soviet car factory on my watch! But more fundamentally, I considered it immoral for journals to make junior scholars...

Transnational Radicals: Labour Dissent and Political Activism in Detroit and Turin (1950–1970)

SummaryThis article investigates the entangled histories of radicals in Detroit and Turin who challenged capitalism in ways that departed from “orthodox” Marxism. Starting from the 1950s, small but influential groups of labour radicals, such as Correspondence in Detroit and Quaderni Rossi in Turin, circulated ideas that questioned the Fordist system in a drastic way. These radicals saw the car factories as laboratories for a possible “autonomist” working-class activity that could take over industrial production and overhaul the societal system. They criticized the usefulness of the unions and urged workers to develop their own forms of collective organization. These links were rekindled during the intense working-class mobilization of the late 1960s, when younger radicals would also engage in a dialogue across national boundaries that influenced each other's interpretation of the local context. These transnational connections, well-known to contemporaries but ignored by historians, show how American events and debates were influenced by, and impinged on, distant countries, and how local activists imagined their political identity as encompassing struggles occurring elsewhere.

Heavy metal [maintenance engineering

'Reduce, Reuse, Repair and Recycle' is a phrase for many modern companies but one Liverpool establishment has been sticking to these principles for two generations. Although the family-owned company grew in large part by working on shipping and it still does some maritime work, its workshops also refurbish the generators from Wind turbines, machinery from local car factories, food processing equipment and host of other electrical, electronic and mechanical gear.

Rozwój przemysłu samochodowego w Brazylii w latach 1957–2005

The article examines development of the Brazilian automobile sector from the path-breaking program of installation an automotive industry in 1956 until the year 2005. The efforts of the Brazilian government to produce motor vehicles were part of a general import-substituting development strategy. The main aim of this plan was to restrict import of cars and completely or semi-knocked-down kits (CKDs or SKDs), which were assembled locally, and forced international automotive companies to choose between abandoning the Brazilian market and, with the help of financial incentives, producing cars with 90–95% Brazilian-made content within five years.The plan implemented by Brazil’s government was successful in accelerating the development of automobile sector. After the recession period in the early and mid-1960s, partially induced by the military coup d’état in 1964, at the end of the 1960s the automobile sector showed signs of having achieved maturity. During the 1970s production of this industry was growing very fast, exceeding the level of 1 million cars in the year 1980. The raise in the prices of petroleum at the end of the 1970s triggered off an economic crisis in Brazil, lasting until the beginning of the 1990.The process of economic stabilization undertaken since the implementation of the Fernando Cardoso’s “Plano Real” in 1994 led to relative economic stability, which, despite the period of economic crises in late 1998 and early 1999– lasted until the year 2005. Economic stabilization drove car manufacturers to the second large expansion at the Brazilian automobile sector. The combined value of investments in the years 1994–2001 exceeded 14.8 millions USD. It was connected with the second large wave of migration of international car manufactures to Brazil (Tab. 1).As a result of such large investments the car production exceeded the level of 2.5 millions vehicles, of which more than 2 millions constituted passenger cars. New FDI in this sector produced also a strong territorial competition among Brazilian states, which triggered short-term spells of economic growth in the place of new investment but was unlikely to lead to any long-term economic benefits (Rodriguez-Poze, Arbix 2001). One of clearly visible effects of new investments is geographical dispersion of automobile industry, and the end of domination in car manufacturing of the state of São Paulo (Fig. 4). The second great improvement took place in productivity of the Brazilian car factories. The productivity per worker increased, in the years 1990-2005, from 7.8 to 26.8 vehicles per employee per annum, which was connected with production modernization in existing plants, and implementation of new technology in “greenfield” plants, and resulted in employment reduction (Fig. 5).

Agricultural land market in Slovakia

The agricultural land market in Slovakia has noted an increased dynamics recently. Such situation was a result of entering big foreign investors, particularly car factories, which had bought agricultural land for construction purposes. It resulted in the raised prices of plots. Agricultural land prices sold for the further agricultural use are markedly lower from the national point of view than in the EU-15. Such prices are also the third lowest ones within the new member countries of the EU.

The Optimal Diversity Management Problem

In some industries, a certain part can be needed in a very large number of different configurations. This is the case, e.g., for the electrical wirings in European car factories. A given configuration can be replaced by a more complete, therefore more expensive, one. The diversity management problem consists of choosing an optimal set of some given number k of configurations that will be produced, any nonproduced configuration being replaced by the cheapest produced one that is compatible with it. We model the problem as an integer linear program. Our aim is to solve those problems to optimality. The large-scale instances we are interested in lead to difficult LP relaxations, which seem to be intractable by the best direct methods currently available. Most of this paper deals with the use of Lagrangean relaxation to reduce the size of the problem in order to be able, subsequently, to solve it to optimality via classical integer optimization.

Mulheres fora de lugar?

Este texto trata da estreita relação entre a presença das mulheres na pré-montagem e montagem final dos veículos e os novos paradigmas produtivos. Ao contrário do que se poderia supor, as mulheres não estão fora de lugar nas indústrias automobilísticas, como revela um estudo comparativo, sobre essas indústrias, em Portugal e no Brasil.

Company approaches concerning workers with performance alterations or disablement: interview findings on the perspectives of the various parties involved

This paper provides information about the research programme "In-plant interventions in the German car industry to increase job opportunities for employees with (severe) disabilities". The research was done in 2000 by the University of Trier and the International Research Unit for Work and Social Integration (IFASI). The purpose of the study was to capture, document, and analyse internal practices of occupational rehabilitation in five German car factories. Taking a qualitative approach, 23 persons of different company areas were interviewed, and numerous documents were analysed. The article reflects applied disability management strategies and points out success factors and barriers of inclusion.

Hazard proximities of childhood cancers in Great Britain from 1953-80.

STUDY OBJECTIVES: Firstly, to examine relationships between the birth and death addresses of children dying from leukaemia and cancer in Great Britain, and the sites of potential environmental hazards; and...

Wood dust from jelutong (Dyera costulata) causes contact allergy.

Jelutong is the wood from Dyera costulata growing in south-east Asia. It is soft and easy to work and is used in, e.g., model workshops in car factories. It has also been much used in woodwork teaching in Swedish comprehensive schools. To estimate the prevalence of contact allergy to jelutong, 84 woodwork teachers and 110 consecutive dermatitis patients were patch tested with extract from wood dust of jelutong. 16/84 (19%) teachers had positive reactions. When they were tested with a dilution series, positive reactions were obtained for 6 mg and down to 0.3 mg of the extracted material. Half the test-positive teachers had skin symptoms that might be related to exposure to jelutong 4/110 dermatitis patients at the clinic also had positive reactions, and possible exposure to jelutong was traced in 3 of them. 3 other dermatitis patients had flare-up reactions after about 2 weeks, indicating patch-test sensitization. To investigate the sensitizing capacity of the extract, the cumulative contact enhancement test was performed in guinea pigs. This confirmed that the extracted material was sensitizing, and a clear dose-response relationship was found. The schools will be recommended to use safer wood alternatives in woodwork teaching.

Book Review: British Car Factories from 1896

Book Review: British Car Factories from 1896

Wealth of fascinating information

Journal Article Wealth of fascinating information Get access British Car Factories from 1896: a complete historical, geographical, architectural and technological survey by Collins Paul and Stratton Michael Veloce Godmanstone, 1993, 268, £40, 1-874-10504-9 A D George A D George School of Social Studies of Technology, Manchester Metropolitan University, Cavendish Street, Manchester, M15 6BG, UK. He is in the Manchester Region of the Industrial Archaeological Society Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Science and Public Policy, Volume 21, Issue 2, April 1994, Pages 131–132, https://doi.org/10.1093/spp/21.2.131 Published: 01 April 1994

SAAB 99GL

THE Scandinavian reputation for product durability and clean, functional design is nowhere better exemplified than in the Swedish car factories of Volvo and Saab.

The Motor Industry

The motor industry is always in the news. As workers earn higher and higher wages they tend to become the scapegoats for management and other industrial workers. And as larger numbers of foreign cars are imported the British motor industry has to combat criticisms about the quality of the vehicles being produced. The management tends to feel that the industry is misrepresented, and managers are anxious to show off the production‐line in the best light. Add to this strikes, attacks on supervisors through boredom, Henry Ford's indictment of the British car factories, chaos and reorganisation, and it is clear that any accurate assessment is difficult.